


thursday's child

by opensummer



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Hacker Skye | Daisy Johnson, Headcanon, POV Skye | Daisy Johnson, Rising Tide, Skye does pop culture, Skye | Daisy Johnson Feels, hacking doesn't work like that, minor skye/miles lydon, runaway skye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 21:27:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14198040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opensummer/pseuds/opensummer
Summary: Daisy renames herself on Thursday, two days after the mother she never had a chance to know dies. She always renames herself on Thursday.





	thursday's child

**Author's Note:**

> So I actually wrote like 700 words of this after 3.01 when I was trying to make sense of the name change and then lost it in my WIP folder. Found it a couple weeks ago and decided I wanted to see where it was going. 
> 
> Very little remains from the original but that’s ok. I like what it turned into.

Sister Cornelia, who was seventy if she was a day, should not have been allowed to name anyone. Alas, she was the one who opened the door to the SHIELD agents passing themselves off as social workers. She was the one who ushered them into the orphanage’s office. She was the one who watched them hem and haw over a name until she wrote them off as the brand of social workers that would break after a month or two more in the job and go on to work that was less heart wrenching. The man, in particular, clutched the baby as if he couldn’t leave it. So she pulled Mary from her fond memories of a childhood friend, Sue to round out the certificate, Poots from the list of last names they kept on file behind the main desk for just these occasions. She’d clucked at the man until he handed the baby over and harried them out the door.

“Well,” she’d said, “let’s find you a bed Miss Mary.”

That’s her version of the story, one Mary had pulled out of her in bits and pieces showing instincts that will serve her through her SHIELD career years before it begins.  

Mary thanks her and two weeks later when she’s sure she’s got everything Sister Cornelia remembers, she runs.

Mary runs on a Thursday, because Fridays are always more chaotic than the rest of the week and she thinks she might be able to make it until the weekend before they report her missing. She’s got money and a plan, vague hopes of tracking down the social workers but first she’s gotta get out of Texas. On Wednesday, she tells her roommate she’s sneaking out to smoke and breaks into the main office of the orphanage. She steals her paper file, and fires up the creaky desktop they keep for the state social services.

Mary, for good behavior, is allowed to use it twice a week as she’s been teaching herself to program. The password is always _password_ , computer savy the nuns are not.

She lets herself into the system and deletes all of her files before she powers it down and return to her bed, clutching the paper file. She’s read it before in its entirety, on one for the afternoons the nuns had left her to her own devices, trusting the lock to keep her out; their mistake. There’s a long list of foster families, that she’d been removed from every six months, and the names of the social workers who dropped her off. Mary is sure there’s more to this story than that.

 

* * *

 

Tatiana hitchhikes to San Antonio, flashing the driver a smile and the pink razer phone she stole from a wealthier classmate. She tells him she’s seventeen and going to visit her brother at Trinity for concert this weekend. Her parents encourage her independence, she says. No nickname, she says.

They did midsummers night dream in English six months ago and she liked the way the names sounded rolling on the tongue.

He drops her at Trinity’s campus, going so far as to find the dorm she told him her brother was rooming in and tells her to look out for herself as she smiles and waves him on.

Tatiana buys a ticket to LA because that’s what runaways with pretentious names _do_ in America. They run to Hollywood and hope for the best. She’s nearly a statistic three times over before she tumbles out the greyhound, blinking California sun out of her eyes. Fourteen hundred miles later and she’s already harder than she was when she started. She wastes half her money on a tour of the city and sleeps rough with a couple of other kids in a shitty neighborhood before the owner of the local diner takes pity on her and arranges a job. She couchsurfs a coworker until she saves up enough money to buy a falling apart wreck of a car, affectionately named Puck on the days he runs, 'cause she’s got a theme damnit.

At the diner she’s Tati, and Ana, and Tia to a rotating cast of actress, model, whatevers, who tell her that whatever she’s running from can’t be worse than this, living out of a car and eating diner scraps. She can always spot former foster kids in the way they don’t preach at her.  

Tatiana’s got a file in the trunk of her car and on her days off, midweek, she goes to the local library and signs up for successive sessions with the computers they have. Tatiana’s got a space inside her that’s empty and she thinks having the answers will help her fill it.

The social workers who dropped her off are dead ends, disappearing into the woodwork after they abandoned her. They were based out of DC originally, and she’s thinking it might be time to head east again. Take a look around the DC offices servers.

Puck dies a death he won’t be coming back from on Thursday and Tatiana trips a trap left for visitors like her behind the NSA’s firewalls on a library computer. If it were her computer she’d kill the power, remove the harddrive and burn it. It’s not so she packs her backpack and stops by the library desk on her way out, manned by Mrs Wheeler who always has the Wednesday afternoon shift and always slips her a treat when she stops by, turns in the number they gave her, and mentions the computer was acting up a bit.

“Might want to get it checked out.” She says, and declines a chat, saying she’s got a shift to get to.

Marian Wheeler will remember that when the Feds question her but won’t be able to come up with Tatiana’s last name, despite talking to her at least once a week for nearly six months.

She’s getting on the bus when the FBI wheels up to library, sirens screaming, lights flashing. The driver rubbernecks as she finds a seat against a window.

 _Too close_ , Tatiana thinks, leaning her head back, closing her eyes.

She clears Puck, leaves the papers in the glovebox and a note for whoever finds him that he’s theirs if they want him and calls in her resignation from a payphone by the greyhound.

Her former boss says, _cops were here earlier asking for you._

Her former boss says, _Tatiana who?_

Her former boss says, _take care of yourself kid._

 

* * *

 

Anne serves coffee in diners and moves from job to job through the states, a new one every month, She waits tables, hustles pool against college boys who are too busy looking down her shirt to pay attention to the game.

Anne because it pairs well with common last names, Anne Jones, Anne Smith, Anne Thomas. She never going to be Mary again but she acknowledges it could useful to have a name that doesn’t stand out.

She dyes streaks in her hair once a week- sunshine yellow, neon green, ocean blue, hitchhikes haphazardly all the way to the east coast and spends three months in the outer banks working at a seafood shack, dishing up plastic baskets of fried shrimp and watching storms roll in. Anne with the common name and the uncommon hair.

Anne has a succession of shitty hundred dollar laptops as she improves her tech skills. She has to smash five of them before she stops making stupid mistakes. Another three after that before she gets better than the security they have on offer. That’s when she finally starts digging.

The DC office is a front, a well disguised, cleverly hidden front. Anne’s pretty sure half of their staff is legit, with no idea of what’s going on in the background. Their security is good; Anne is better. It’s the first time she sees the name SHIELD.

So now the question is SHIELD who?

She trips over another hacker in the NSA’s files, as she’s reading about their interactions with SHIELD and gives them the digital equivalent of a slap upside their head as she disables the trap they were about to step into. They drop a data packet back- a thanks, a query, and a handle- theQuestion, coded into so much noise. She pauses, thinks about it, and drops the bit of code she used to dismantle the trap back.

She gets the same handle and a question mark back and ignores it.

Anne’s self taught, driven by an ability to look at code and see the way it fits together. She lurked in the major sites for hackers as she started out for tips but she’s never asked for help, never took a name, never participated In the communities that thrive on the corners of the web. She hacks but isn’t a hacker and has no wish to identify as such.

So she’s pissed when she sees theQuestion’s left her code on a message board, with a note asking if anybody knows who this is.

Clean, they say about her code, and somebody chimes in with a fragment she left while poking around Ian Quinn’s servers, another with her fingerprints from a FBI hack. She’s a conspiracy theory, a puzzle that needs to be solved. They build a case around her, Rising Tide, two years before they call themselves that.

She takes the site down four times before they figure out something she can’t tear apart in an afternoon and another three times after that before she realizes dismantling the site is only attracting more people to it. Hackers, by nature, are paranoid assholes who don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

She would know.

Anne takes the board down one last time, strips theQuestion of their admin privileges and installs herself as ~canttaketheskyfromme~. Congrats, her profile reads, you found me.

The site goes mad.

She spends the next three days slapping down theQuestion’s attempts to get admin status back and the next two years trading admin privileges back and forth with them whenever they manage to pry it from her hands.

He, she learns. theQuestion has good taste in hacks, interesting ideas about privacy and corporate power, and the somewhat nauseating tendency to write bad pickup lines into his code, starting eight months after she steals the board out from under his nose.

The message board evolves into a chat, evolves into a group of seven. They hack collaboratively, make each other’s causes their own. Anne has a group for the first time. Anne has people on good days and bad. They do not abandon each other. They do not disappear.

They have in jokes and nicknames and are watching theQuestions attempted courtship of her like it’s a tennis match, volleys back and forth, commented and dissected. They call her ~sky when they chat.

A year and half after it’s inception they call for a meetup in Chicago. Four of them will be within three hours drive of the city and the opportunity is to good to pass up. Anne’s in New York then, still digging, when they ask. _Sure_ , she writes back and adds, _pick a dive, I’m not sure how my fake will hold up._

The digital equivalent of crickets follows, _how old are you?_

 _20_ , she writes back.

 _dibs on adopting ~sky_ , is the instant reply from cyver, who’s in her fifties and midwestern. She’s got a husband who works with his hands and teases her about the amount of time she spends talking to people on the internet.

@legalfeegle, late thirties, Hawaiian, two small children and a job in a tech startup says, _stole the words from me_  
Says, _theQuestion are you freaking out right now?????_  
Says, _wtf you’re a baby ~sky_

 _rude,_ she types back and closes her laptop.

Anne quits her job, cracks the bank security of a CEO who took money from the bailout and uses his money to buys a van to drive to Chicago. She outfits it with a desk and mattress, sets up a router that leeches off whatever signal is strongest and closest. She thinks she’ll go fulltime with this. She has questions and the skills to get the answer. Home base, she calls the van affectionately and in the memory of who she’s been names it Oberon.

Anne thinks it might be time to be someone new, and washes the color from her hair.

 

* * *

 

They meet at a dive that micro knows, and arrange it so he meets them outside and points them to the correct table. cyver’s brought her husband and hugs her, @legalfeegle waves from over a drink, slumped on the table bitching about jet lag. And theQuestion, Miles Lydon, smiles at her over his beer and she thinks _fuck,_ _he’s hot_.

“Skye, with an e,” she says and offers a hand.

“Isn’t that a little obvious?” He asks, taking her hand.

“Less than you’d think.” Skye says, having been Skye for a mere ten minutes now.

They get drunk that night and sometime in the night, they toast to the rising tide.

 

* * *

 

In their defense, they were _very_ drunk.

**Author's Note:**

> two whedonverse references for the people playing along at home. One very obvious, the other a little less so.
> 
> If you want to yell about how important skye daisy johnson is you can find me on [tumblr](http://openemptysummer.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Because skye daisy johnson is _very_ important.


End file.
